Weather stations are a popular project, partly because it’s helpful (and interesting) to know about the weather at your exact location rather than a forecast that might be vaguely in your zip code. They’re also popular because they’re a good way to get experience with microcontrollers, sensors, I/O, and communications protocols. Your own build may also be easily upgradeable as the years go by, and [Tysonpower] shows us some of the upgrades he’s made to the popular Sparkfun weather station from a few years ago.
The Sparkfun station is a good basis for a build though, it just needs some updates. The first was that the sensor package isn’t readily available though, but some hunting on Aliexpress netted a similar set of sensors from China. A Wemos D1 Mini was used as a replacement controller, and with it all buttoned up and programmed it turns out to be slightly cheaper (and more up-to-date) than the original Sparkfun station.
All of the parts and code for this new station are available on [Tysonpower]’s Github page, and if you want to take a look at a similar station that we’ve featured here before, there’s one from three years ago that’s also solar-powered.
If you’re looking at the software side, I recommend http://weewx.com/
Open source, python, easily customizable, well supported.
I use it on my personal weather station
+1 Perfect for my Linux-based console, and easily adaptable for different kinds of sensors (commercial, hobbyist, or homemade).
I used Thingsboard in my build what is also Open source and easy to install with a Docker Image or debian package but weewx also looks cool, thanks for the info.
Popular project. How about the accuracy?
Accuracy?
I want precision, right down to 1/100th of a degree!
I don’t care which degree!
B^)
It’s accurate enough for the normal consumer like me i think :)
I might wanna do this soon. Own weather station, plus web scraping of hourly data for comparison. Got my spidey senses riled up by something a few days ago. Checked the weather several times during the day, “live” data, updated each hour, said 0C each time I checked it, and because each time it looked like it hadn’t changed, I manually refreshed and checked the timestamp, yup current and 0C…. yep feels like that, no problem. Next day and I forget why, but I looked at the 24 hour log and what??? it’s like 2,2,3,3,4,4,3,3,2,2,1,1 and I’m now suspicious that weather records got political and I’m being deliberately lied to for some reason.
As I mentioned previously, and although a pain, I had to go another route, and this Weather MOD is what I came up with.